Sui Generis A Tale Of Mondas
by thebadwolf
Summary: I hastily penned this tale this afternoon in response to a challenge on Outpost Gallifrey to make the Cybermen scary again, but I liked the idea so much I thought it deserved a wider audience not so sure it makes them scarier, but more concerned it makes


Sui Generis

A Short Story

By Russ Flinn

© Russell Flinn 2005

Last week, they took my legs.

I had always been curious about what the surgical procedures looked like, and they had been very obliging, first providing me with video archives of the early operations. It was hard to engage with them though, since my face was covered with sterile sheets throughout, and as I watched the scalpels peel away the flesh and fat so that the bone-saw could get to work, they really could have been anyone's arms being severed. How was I to know that the livid red meat was actually mine, or that the quivering yellow fat had been the same that I had lovingly nurtured with fast-food and unused carbohydrates.

So this time, they let me watch live, administering only adequate levels of local anaesthetic so that I could lay, fascinated by the scene unfolding upon the monitor above my head, each leg being stripped to the joint, ivory-white bone gleaming as the sterile wash swept the blood away into a cherry-red whirlpool, draining into the hole that marked the centre of the operating table.

I had always sought to be different. I had dyed my hair – all of it – numerous times and manifold colours. I had worn it in styles that fashions had not yet embraced, and then, when public trends had usurped my unique look, I shaved it off. Sometimes I left scraps of it, just strands here and there. I called it my 'chemo' look, but somehow even that could hardly be original, for every cancer sufferer could claim to have beaten me to that sparse and unhealthy appearance.

Of course, the changes went further than just the shade and shape of the follicles upon my skin.

Indeed, my skin itself was made a badge of honour. I had been kissed by the inked needle on more than one occasion, the soft white tedium of my epidermis traced in lines and diagrammatic cryptograms of my own design. Yet the tattooist's art had its limitations, and before long he had plagiarised my pictograms and I saw facsimiles of my painted flesh everywhere, taunting me, making me alike again.

I explored the realms of scarification, having flirted with self-harm as a youth, and more than once I took a blade to my body, reliving those old pubescent moments of carefully-inflicted pain. In those days, I had done it for several reasons; as a punishment for my own frustrations, or to remind me that I was alive in this dead and dreary world of my elders. But my later experiments were more skilful and deliberate, parting my flesh in a very organised fashion, watching in fascination as the upper layers at first resisted the razor's touch, before finally surrendering and blooming before my very eyes, freeing the blood within and letting the steel explore further, deeper.

I was fooling myself that I was original. Just because I had grown out of the teenage angst that compelled me to disfigure my body, it did not make me any less similar to all those other, young contemporaries of mine who wrote their woes in blood and metal.

There was a brief, but meaningful affair with piercings, and in this environment I finally felt that I could forge my own independence of the norm. No area of my body was safe from the needle or the screwdriver. Wary of involving the high street artists in this field – my memories of the stolen and mass-produced tattoos still haunting me – I set about honing my own craftsmanship, spurning the precision and antiseptic drudgery of the commercial modifiers of the human body. I delighted in my amateurish and ragged work, leaving wounds open for days until I could wait no longer, and created some metallic attachment from whatever I could find around my home. When even that began to feel hackneyed and obvious, I sought out whatever I could find in the streets and scrapyards. Rusted springs from discarded and incinerated mattresses, shards of drinks containers, car parts. Anything was admissible. Nothing was too sacred that it could not become a part of what I was becoming.

My flesh grew rank and diseased, swollen like ripe fruit and as likely to split at the touch. I could see people around me scenting the decay of my skin, the iron-tang of crusting blood that I carried with me. If people stared for too long, it amused me to flex my limbs so that my body wept tears of corruption from its many scars.

Eventually, I have no idea how, I came to the attention of the Institute.

There were long hours of discussion and debate, some passive attempts at therapy and analysis of what perverse psychology had brought me to this. The phrase 'surgical addiction' had been used more than once, but I knew they had no labels for what I was, and no precedent for what I was to be.

They offered me the chance to bind their science with my art, to recreate myself as something so completely 'other' that it would be the accomplishment of all I had striven to achieve.

How was I to resist? The notion of myself as the very purity of the anomalous, unlike anything or anyone that had ever gone before me, it was too great a temptation after all those long and thwarted years. I would never again look at myself in disgrace, seeing only the uniform and the typical.

I would be alone.

The surgery could not come soon enough, and I often despised them for their caution and restraint. The transformation was all I craved, and as every piece of me was slit away and replaced with new and gleaming steel, I prayed for the resolution, for my final leap into a new and unmatched existence.

I had often pondered the claims of amputees, those who believed they could still feel naked flesh and bending sinew despite their losses, and the thought crossed my mind about how much of a being had to be left before he reached the point wherein he teetered on the abyss of no longer being that person again. How much of myself could they safely remove and burn, before the person I would next awake to would no longer be the one who had slipped quietly into anaesthesia only hours before.

I grew stronger, accustomed to my new form. My arms now resisted the blades of old, my legs stronger so as to carry the new weight of my self. This was piercing taken to new heights, for metal no longer divided flesh, but bonded with it, held it within, cradled my life in its cold, immaculate embrace.

Then, just as I had hoped and prayed, it was complete.

I was no longer aware of sleeping or dreaming or the fatigue of my old form. I was simply there, acutely conscious, alert, triumphant. I examined myself, admiring their workmanship in forging for me this new and perfect body. My face could no longer express my satisfaction, for it was gone. No more would I smile or laugh or cry, nor would I ever close my eyes again. I simply stared, unmoved, unreadable, housed in gleaming steel. Nothing would reach me again.

They watched me.

I saw the anxiety, the fear, and the concern in their faces. They were so easy to predict, giving away all their thoughts in the folly of twitching, nervous flesh. I saw them flinch and retreat as I took just one step, and I knew at once that for all their genius they were weak.

I knew at once how little of me was left, how much of my old appetite for diversity had been stripped and severed and cauterised away, when I raised my hand and spoke with a voice decanted of all spirit.

"You will be like me," I heard the voice say.


End file.
